Silence by Anthony Quinn

Author:Anthony Quinn [Quinn, Anthony J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

18

A flash-in-the-pan rainstorm kept Daly confined to his car outside an abandoned cottage, the roof hammering with raindrops, the windscreen wriggling with the distorted shapes of trees. He switched off the engine. The silence within the car felt equal to the silence emanating from the cottage. He rolled down his window, and listened as the ditches deepened their gurgling. He drove off again, bumping cautiously along potholed roads and then even more cautiously over rush-grown lanes.

The detective was driving through border country, following Walsh’s dated map. It was the best guide he had to tracing the homes of the murder triangle victims, to untangling the network of minor roads the killers had once used. It struck him that this journey through the back roads was like travelling into that strangest of places – the past. The idea of summarizing what had happened along these roads daunted him; there were so many personal tragedies on both sides of the community, the murders of so many innocent Protestants and Catholics left unsolved, so much rumour and suspicion, that only bewilderment and fear remained.

The task ahead strengthened his feeling of not knowing which way to turn, this sense of not having a single clear thought in his head. He knew that his mother had been murdered and that her killers had escaped justice, swallowed up in the murkiness of the past. In his mind, he tried to juggle her murder with the other twenty-odd cases marked on Walsh’s murder map.

As he drove, derelict cottages emerged from lanes like ghosts of his own cottage. He stared at each one; they were his obsession now. Something to take the place of his introvert’s collection of vehicle registration numbers. Every thorn hedge seemed to hide another potential murder site; every ditch brimmed with murky mysteries, the hummocky little fields like rucked-up carpet hiding swept-away secrets. He got out, strolled around the wild margins of their plots, gawking at the extent of ruin. The similarities with his father’s farm held him spellbound. They belonged to the same kingdom of slippage and neglect.

He drove down roads he had forgotten existed, trying to discriminate in his head between the different murders, sifting through the array of facts accumulated by the priest. He wanted to limit the cases to a significant few, the ones that had most in common with his mother’s.

He played with the possibility that a serial killer had been at work, operating on a psychopathic level, killing innocent people because the justice system and the media were so overwhelmed with the deaths of so many Catholics and Protestants that they ignored his handiwork, his bloody trail of evidence.

He delved further into Walsh’s map, going deeper into border country. There was no going back now, he told himself. The evening grew darker, the roads and thorn thickets and low hills became indistinguishable. He remained transfixed, hunched over his steering wheel, the car headlights groping the blackness.

He pulled up a muddy lane, and located another ruinous old house dimly visible through the trees, another fractured mirror revealing fragments of his past.

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